Are we ready to recycle cars’ lithium batteries?

I just wanted to let everyone know, as someone that works in this space, 99% of the comments gave me freaking brain cancer.

Literally the best comment is hidden because of downvoted and I only saw it because of the pile on ridicule in nested quotes.

If you RTFA, you’ll see that the authors cite the fact that most of the cost of a battery pack is indeed manufacturing (coincidentally exactly why Elon build GF) not the raw lithium or electrolyte. This forms the basic premise of the question the authors pose: is there a cost effective way to recycle these things.

The lithium isn’t as expensive as the REMs in used in emissions catalyst systems (platinum, palladium, rubidium, etc), so burning the batteries to generate a shitty lithium alloy that needs expensive purification isn’t cost effective against virgin lithium.

Selling the kWh remaining in the packs to the grid at the point of recycling sounds good until you realize how cheap grid power is, which mostly leaves grid scale storage.

The reason he's buried under negative opinion is because the issue with batteries is the waste and environmental damage that comes from lithium landfill disposal and mining.

Fortunately, most cars and battery grid storage now use assemblies of cylindrical lithium batteries (18650 or 2170) because those are Gigafactory scale ups.

If we manage to automate disassembly of a few standard cylindrical form factors (and a set of standard chemistries) and achieve 90% recycling efficiency, this could stretch the lithium lifecycle by 10x over mining.

Thanks to the big boom of cylindrical lithium batteries (over 90 percent by bulk due to large battery assemblies), that portion can be reasonably automated.

The price drops of cylindrical lithium batteries have been nothing short of astounding.

Expected to fall to about $64/kWh in 2030. A megawatt hour becomes real cheap that way.

Smartphone batteries are another thing altogether, but the bulk is actually going to be the ginormous volume of car batteries, public transit batteries (bus, trains, trams, etc), and fixed grid batteries.

They are now quickly standardizing around common cylinder shaped lithium’s assembled into massive packs. So there may be able to be some modicum of standardized automated disassembly in due time. Hopefully.

Afaik Tesla is the only automotive OEM to use cylindrical cells.

And they use them for several good reasons, production and heat being the main ones, as well as draw rate and charging speed, some of the others are looking at packet batteries because they can be more dense but they also arent looking as much at thermal management systems which are critical for a long vehicle life.

I can't imagine why there would exist used but functional car battery packs for usage in grid or home storage. Electric cars will be resold and utilized until their battery fail. That is what we're seeing now. Used electric cars are great value, and their low running cost is especially attractive to the people who buy used cars.

“Failed” for a car can still be useful for a grid. If your battery can no longer get you to town, or up the hill, it can still power the grid.

There’ll also be plenty of cars retired because other stuff broke. Those batteries can go to cars with failed batteries, or straight to the grid.

trick is the chemistry that may be ideal for a car might not be for the grid, hence why Tesla uses a different chemistry for that. having said that usually its just a few modules that are bad not the whole battery, and not all the cells would be bad in the module at that, so you could take just the bad modules, test the cells and put together rebuilt battery modules out of the good ones

That is a short term issue with NCA cells. NCM and LFP cells work well both for vehicles and storage. The incoming NCMA and LMFP cells also handle both use cases.

How quick does a LIon battery really degrade. I've small ones (RC car / tools etc) for a long time but not in a car.

So, how long does the 250 mile range in a Tesla go down to 200 miles? 175 miles?

it depends on a number of things, partly whether it's designed as an "energy" cell (capacity) or a "power" cell (high discharge/charge rate tolerant.) R/C batteries aren't necessarily a good model because a lot of them get treated very harshly. I've seen (and backed away from) more swollen LiPO packs than I care to mention.

It seems the easiest approach would be to require that the car manufacturers handle the recycling of the battery packs in the cars they've sold once they reach their true EOL (post grid-storage etc.)

Presumably, each manufacturer will know exactly the disassembly process (for maintenance at least, but also based on assembly process), and will use the same type (or few types) of cells across their lineup. Plus they're used to developing and refining processes with as much automation as possible. They also have existing relationships (that involve money, a big plus) with the cell manufacturers so they could team up on the final stages.

Of course, the devil is in the details. We'd have to monitor that they're really doing it and doing it right. And they would certainly build the cost into the cars they sell. But the alternative (for batteries that are beyond storage use) is to have public subsidies going to recyclers. It seems to be the only way, outside of artificially raising the price of raw materials enough so that recycling them is not a loss-making activity.

I suspect that a major benefit of making it the manufacturer's problem wouldn't so much be the expertise(though that's a plus); but the incentives it creates to make 'recycles well' a design priority.

Knowing how it was assembled is, in itself, only slightly more helpful than what reverse engineers have likely already provided us because 3rd parties are interested in keeping an eye on one another's progress; and if the manufacturing knowledge basically boils down to "here are the different stages of using stubborn adhesives to make sure that the materials you want to separate stay nice and bonded" that isn't going to be 100% helpful.

If they know that the end of life is their problem, though, we'll presumably see more design choices that favor both improvements to 'degraded' usability(eg. designing the charge controller for a big cell pack to be able to segregate dead cells with higher granularity, vs. declaring the entire pack unsafe once the weakest cells make charging the entire thing a concern; having a charge controller that actually cooperates with things other than the vendor's model year X vehicles and nothing else); and also physical design choices that make cleaner and easier separation of disassembly less onerous.

If recycling is not their problem, it's much less likely that it will get a seat at the table, especially when the batteries are already 'recycleable'* (*possibly not economically, if 3rd parties figure it out, other terms and restrictions may apply) and can be labelled as such without extra work.

Rather than making the OEM perform the recycling themselves, I think it would be more efficient in both energy and cost for there to be larger facilities dealing with the batteries from multiple sources. I'm sure a solution can be worked out to deal with the different chemistries used - there'll be a few different architypes of batteries used that can be streamed within the plant.

For consumer goods, recycling is that very last resort, because it often just results in inefficient downcycling of materials. But recycling allows people to feel good about buying new things at the same reckless pace that they always have, so it ends up being emphasized.

For consumer goods, recycling is that very last resort, because it often just results in inefficient downcycling of materials. But recycling allows people to feel good about buying new things at the same reckless pace that they always have, so it ends up being emphasized.

I mean, I'd rather people use stainless straws, if they like and need straws, than use disposable one-use plastic. But yeah - in general, better than recycling consumer goods, and better than durable multi-use consmer goods, are the consumer goods you didn't buy in the first place, and which didn't get produced.

I purged an entire storage tub full of useless plastic gimcracks from my son's play area this last weekend and felt absolutely disgusted with myself and the entire economy.

I wonder how many used ICE cars would be sold if you had to replace the engine when you bought it? That's about the same as replacing a battery pack on an EV.

Unless it's super old, a used EV is not going to require a full battery change. Nissan Leafs lose more capacity because they have an aircooled battery, but any modern EV with a battery management system will still be at 90%ish capacity after 5 years.

I just wanted to let everyone know, as someone that works in this space, 99% of the comments gave me freaking brain cancer.

Literally the best comment is hidden because of downvoted and I only saw it because of the pile on ridicule in nested quotes.

If you RTFA, you’ll see that the authors cite the fact that most of the cost of a battery pack is indeed manufacturing (coincidentally exactly why Elon build GF) not the raw lithium or electrolyte. This forms the basic premise of the question the authors pose: is there a cost effective way to recycle these things.

The lithium isn’t as expensive as the REMs in used in emissions catalyst systems (platinum, palladium, rubidium, etc), so burning the batteries to generate a shitty lithium alloy that needs expensive purification isn’t cost effective against virgin lithium.

Selling the kWh remaining in the packs to the grid at the point of recycling sounds good until you realize how cheap grid power is, which mostly leaves grid scale storage.

The reason he's buried under negative opinion is because the issue with batteries is the waste and environmental damage that comes from lithium landfill disposal and mining.

That's a regulatory problem, not one fundamental to the production of lithium.

I heard they can be used for making meth (not got around to watching breaking bad yet), that's a growing industry.....

I can say this because I already paid for my past: Just as pointed out in the article the practicalities of disassembly make some cells hard to reuse.

Discharged single-use lithium-ion batteries lack useable elemental lithium, and disassembly of rechargeable lithium-ions is so dangerous/difficult in an uncontrolled environment that not even meth cooks do it.

Now it's cheaper to make virgin plastic (no) thanks to fracking than it costs to recycle used plastic. What happens to all these used batteries as production costs of new decline? We dump them all next to the airplane graveyard?

We'll need to recycle, but we should be focusing on the first two steps as well.

You can forget 1 when you’re trying to have EV replace ICE. Recycling and more needs to be solved if EV is ever going to be more than a privilege for the rich that just puts the environmental impact out of their direct view.

That's not true at all. Sure the absolute production of liion batteries is going to increase but we can reduce the amount needed in several ways. Several options: more efficient cell design that reduces or replaces cobolt, more efficient cars that need less capacity for the same range, and better and more prevalent charging infrastructure to reduce the required range. Nobody has found a practical model for rental road trip battery boosters, but it would be great to only drag around a 100 mile pack for your daily commute and rent an extra 200 mile pack twice a year.

Also your implication that EV environmental impact is the same as ICEs but just moved around is completely wrong and anyone still promoting that myth in 2019 is just being deliberately ignorant or trolling.

I wonder how many used ICE cars would be sold if you had to replace the engine when you bought it? That's about the same as replacing a battery pack on an EV.

Unless it's super old, a used EV is not going to require a full battery change. Nissan Leafs lose more capacity because they have an aircooled battery, but any modern EV with a battery management system will still be at 90%ish capacity after 5 years.

The average age of a used car is 11 years. After 11 years most cars still have a serviceable engine. Don't get me wrong, I like EV's and I want one, I'm just not going to pay for a car with failing electronics and mechanical bits falling apart AND it needs to have a 10K battery replaced.

I wonder how many used ICE cars would be sold if you had to replace the engine when you bought it? That's about the same as replacing a battery pack on an EV.

Unless it's super old, a used EV is not going to require a full battery change. Nissan Leafs lose more capacity because they have an aircooled battery, but any modern EV with a battery management system will still be at 90%ish capacity after 5 years.

The average age of a used car is 11 years. After 11 years most cars still have a serviceable engine. Don't get me wrong, I like EV's and I want one, I'm just not going to pay for car with failing electronics and mechanical bits falling apart AND it needs to have a 10K battery replaced.

For questions like this, averages are a terrible measure of central tendency. Yes, the average age of a used car is 11 years, but if a small number of used cars are 15, 20, 30 years old - and they are! - that skews the average higher in a misleading way. So no, most used cars on the market are not 11 years old, most of them are 3-7 years old and a smaller number are older. And I guarantee you'll be able to find 3-7 year old EVs that still retain a very useable battery life.

That's assuming, of course, that most EVs are bought and sold by consumers, rather than being leased or subscribed to. Most of the industry is assuming that a transition to subscription models is upcoming; I'm not sure I'm that convinced of that particular future, but I'm not convinced the new and used car market will continue to work as it does moving forward.

I wonder how many used ICE cars would be sold if you had to replace the engine when you bought it? That's about the same as replacing a battery pack on an EV.

Unless it's super old, a used EV is not going to require a full battery change. Nissan Leafs lose more capacity because they have an aircooled battery, but any modern EV with a battery management system will still be at 90%ish capacity after 5 years.

The average age of a used car is 11 years. After 11 years most cars still have a serviceable engine. Don't get me wrong, I like EV's and I want one, I'm just not going to pay for car with failing electronics and mechanical bits falling apart AND it needs to have a 10K battery replaced.

For questions like this, averages are a terrible measure of central tendency. Yes, the average age of a used car is 11 years, but if a small number of used cars are 20, 30, 50 years old - and they are! - that skews the average higher in a misleading way. So no, most used cars on the market are not 11 years old.

I didn't say most used cars are 11 years old, I said most 11 year old cars have a serviceable engine. As for those 20-50 year old cars I bet if the dash light goes out you don't have to replace the entire instrument panel. That's sort of what we are talking about here. EV's have integrated components that when they fail it's a major repair that for the average person will sideline that vehicle. So be it the control screen or the battery used EVs will be like used smart phones that die and get put in the bin.

A 24kWh Leaf used as a taxi in Spain did 340000km on its first battery. The owner changed the battery when it lost 50% of range. The car ended as an insurance write-off when a BMW crashed into it from behind.

I wonder how many used ICE cars would be sold if you had to replace the engine when you bought it? That's about the same as replacing a battery pack on an EV.

Unless it's super old, a used EV is not going to require a full battery change. Nissan Leafs lose more capacity because they have an aircooled battery, but any modern EV with a battery management system will still be at 90%ish capacity after 5 years.

The average age of a used car is 11 years. After 11 years most cars still have a serviceable engine. Don't get me wrong, I like EV's and I want one, I'm just not going to pay for car with failing electronics and mechanical bits falling apart AND it needs to have a 10K battery replaced.

For questions like this, averages are a terrible measure of central tendency. Yes, the average age of a used car is 11 years, but if a small number of used cars are 20, 30, 50 years old - and they are! - that skews the average higher in a misleading way. So no, most used cars on the market are not 11 years old.

I didn't say most used cars are 11 years old, I said most 11 year old cars have a serviceable engine. As for those 20-50 year old cars I bet if the dash light goes out you don't have to replace the entire instrument panel. That's sort of what we are talking about here. EV's have integrated components that when they fail it's a major repair that for the average person will sideline that vehicle. So be it the control screen or the battery used EVs will be like used smart phones that die and get put in the bin.

This is true of any modern car. 20-50 year old vehicles don't have systems as integrated as current ones do. That said, it's totally possible to replace a telematics system on a modern car, so it's not like any minor failure is going to doom an EV. Systems integration doesn't necessarily mean the entire car is fragile. It just means you can't pop a fuse in and roll.

And as noted, EV batteries don't generally completely stop working. They just lose capacity. A Tesla Model 3 with 85% of its battery life left is still a completely usable car.

I wonder what the price / complexity of recycling NiMh batteries is in comparison. Many hybrid vehicles are still using the older battery technology for smaller batteries that help augment ICE power sources and provide better fuel mileage.

No comparison. Car li-ion batteries are generally made with the same type of cells you find inside of almost everything that uses li-ion and doesn't need to be paper thin. Open one up and you find hundreds of AA style cells that are spot welded or soldered together. The same cells you find in cordless power tools, external cell phone battery packs, those lil' solar rechargable yard lights and well you'll be hard pressed to find things are still using other rechargables without a good reason for doing so. While easy enough to repurpose one battery pack, doing so for a lot of them takes a lot of work since cutting out the spot welded tabs without ruining the battery takes a bit of finess.

Again, this is only true for Tesla. It was Eberhardt and Tarpenning that cylindrical laptop cells were getting cheap enough to stick a whole bunch of them in a car that got Tesla off the ground and got Musk to invest. But no other car maker has gone for cylindrical cells, by the time they got around to building longer range BEVs the advantages of pouch or prismatic cells became clear.

Fortunately, most cars and battery grid storage now use assemblies of cylindrical lithium batteries (18650 or 2170) because those are Gigafactory scale ups.

If we manage to automate disassembly of a few standard cylindrical form factors (and a set of standard chemistries) and achieve 90% recycling efficiency, this could stretch the lithium lifecycle by 10x over mining.

Thanks to the big boom of cylindrical lithium batteries (over 90 percent by bulk due to large battery assemblies), that portion can be reasonably automated.

The price drops of cylindrical lithium batteries have been nothing short of astounding.

Expected to fall to about $64/kWh in 2030. A megawatt hour becomes real cheap that way.

Smartphone batteries are another thing altogether, but the bulk is actually going to be the ginormous volume of car batteries, public transit batteries (bus, trains, trams, etc), and fixed grid batteries.

They are now quickly standardizing around common cylinder shaped lithium’s assembled into massive packs. So there may be able to be some modicum of standardized automated disassembly in due time. Hopefully.

Afaik Tesla is the only automotive OEM to use cylindrical cells.

And they use them for several good reasons, production and heat being the main ones, as well as draw rate and charging speed, some of the others are looking at packet batteries because they can be more dense but they also arent looking as much at thermal management systems which are critical for a long vehicle life.

No, those are post-hoc justifications. Any student of Tesla's history can tell you that Tesla uses them because in 2009 Eberhardt and Tarpenning realized you could make a 53kWh battery pack from a bunch of laptop cells relatively cost-effectively.

Still, it's been so dominant -- that of a sudden, it's the majority of lithium battery bulk manufactured in year 2019 -- and that they're now the cheapest.

In fact, at the current seismic price drops, a single reusable 18650 (18mm x 65mm) or a 2170 (21mm x 70mm) lithium battery cell -- when purchased in factory bulk quantities -- is now cheaper than a disposable Duracell AA battery from a Costco/Walmart sale.

Very few battery shapes can be cheaply mass manufactured in automated factories, and that's the cylinder. And that might be best, to allow "designed for disassembly" recycle economics. Other formats should exist, but inexpensive electric cars may have to standardize around this concept.

Even the cylinder being an imperfect compromise shape for dense stacking, has (posthoc) silver linings as a side effect -- the shape is very strong end-to-end, the large numbers of separate batteries provides flex/shock absorption opportunities, and the gaps between them provides lots of opportunities for cooling, even when tightly hexagon-packed in massive numbers into battery pack arrays. With modern charge controllers that are already gently single-cell-recharging (the battery balancers is defacto like over 1000 separate battery chargers -- mind boggling -- and even automatically quarantining batteries that went bad), these seem to have cracked quite a lot of economics.

I feel it's a matter of time before a few other vendors capitulates and decides to standardize around automated robot-manufactured lithium batteries like Tesla's -- at least for mass-manufacture cars -- just to merely be cost-competitive at the low end.

We may need more dense flat batteries for more expensive cars but we likely still need robot-assembled and robot-disassembled standardized formats. And it's hard to see a cheap "Designed For Disassembly" system being anything other than the 100+ year old cylindrical battery shape, as tried-true as rubber tires and railroad metal, etc.

The energy density is far by sufficient for low-cost electric cars and that is why I see it as a huge winner.

Something to think about: there's a lot more than battery cells in an EV battery. It won't be possible to just pull one from a chassis and plug it in.

Considering that a plethora of idiosyncratic implementation details are embedded in battery safety interlocks, data communications with vehicle chassis of various makes and models of EV, it seems as though a couple of hurdles stand ahead of relatively easy reapplication of worn batteries.

They'll need a standard of interlock method that can easily be enabled where otherwise the battery won't connect without a chassis present, and for the battery to be either lobotomized or provided with a standard communications hardware interface and protocol for integration into other uses.

Without taking this into account, the batteries will be (in some cases) impossible to discharge and charging virtually any of them will be impossible.

That is, if we're not to go to the expensive hand work, labor costs of disassembly mentioned by the authors. Disassembling batteries and reassembling into cell-compatible buildups so as to dump all of the vehicle-specific details and repurpose the cells doesn't seem practical, or affordable.

It's a Tower of Babel right now; the battery in our vehicle can only speak to and function in a suitably equipped GM chassis. A Tesla battery, same deal, rinse and repeat with all the others. Needs to be accounted for, somehow.

There's also the thermal management system. A Tesla can either cool or heat the battery, and one reason for the cylindrical cells is that they can be packed closely around the coolant channels. You might do without some of that if you restrict the system to very slow charging and discharging. Would that still work for grid storage?

We'll have to recycle the cells, as we're going to run out of lithium a lot faster than people want to admit as we transition to green energy and EVs. Even if we don't have the technology for it now, give it 10 years, we'll have good ways to pull the packs and cells apart to get the lithium out of them for making new cells.

Um, no. There is some 230 billion tonnes of lithium in seawater. Lithium will get more expensive, and recycling will be a good idea, but there is no real way that we'll "run out".

For all intents and purposes we will run out as that level of lithium in sea water is about 168 parts per billion which is not ever going to be economical to extract from the ocean as you have to strip all the sodium, potassium, calcium etc salts out which occur at much higher concentrations. So it does mean recycling will be critical to ensure we can meet the demand for lithium, as concentrated sources are rare and are running out.

We all know that Haber invented a catalyst for converting H2 and N2 into NH3. For this he won (along with Bosch) the Nobel Prize. We all know that Haber introduced Cl2 gas as a weapon in the FIrst World War. For this he was condemned.

He also decided that he would pay for the reparations that Germany owed He noticed that the oceans of the world contain an immense amount of gold. All he had to do was electrolyse sea water, and Bingo. Trials showed that not only was there an immense amount of gold in the oceans of the world, but also the oceans of the world are immense too.

Fortunately, most cars and battery grid storage now use assemblies of cylindrical lithium batteries (18650 or 2170) because those are Gigafactory scale ups.

If we manage to automate disassembly of a few standard cylindrical form factors (and a set of standard chemistries) and achieve 90% recycling efficiency, this could stretch the lithium lifecycle by 10x over mining.

Thanks to the big boom of cylindrical lithium batteries (over 90 percent by bulk due to large battery assemblies), that portion can be reasonably automated.

The price drops of cylindrical lithium batteries have been nothing short of astounding.

Expected to fall to about $64/kWh in 2030. A megawatt hour becomes real cheap that way.

Smartphone batteries are another thing altogether, but the bulk is actually going to be the ginormous volume of car batteries, public transit batteries (bus, trains, trams, etc), and fixed grid batteries.

They are now quickly standardizing around common cylinder shaped lithium’s assembled into massive packs. So there may be able to be some modicum of standardized automated disassembly in due time. Hopefully.

Afaik Tesla is the only automotive OEM to use cylindrical cells.

And they use them for several good reasons, production and heat being the main ones, as well as draw rate and charging speed, some of the others are looking at packet batteries because they can be more dense but they also arent looking as much at thermal management systems which are critical for a long vehicle life.

No, those are post-hoc justifications. Any student of Tesla's history can tell you that Tesla uses them because in 2009 Eberhardt and Tarpenning realized you could make a 53kWh battery pack from a bunch of laptop cells relatively cost-effectively.

That explains the 18650 cell usage, but doesn't explain why they used the same design for the 2170 cells used in the Model 3. There was obviously an efficiency to be gained from the cylindrical design and Tesla had the data to know it - whether it was design, production, functionality, or something else. Unless you're suggesting that when planning the manufacture of their first large volume vehicle they didn't bother to make the biggest single cost as efficient as they could.

Also, someone else stated the Panasonic makes the cells used in Teslas. Not really. Panasonic manufactures them, but the cells are proprietary designs from Tesla. An analogy would be to say that Foxconn manufactures iPhones, but the word "make" is probably a stretch without context.

An interesting point I have no data about and have not seen discussed is what happens to the efficiency of charging and discharging old batteries. We know that bad or old cells have a higher internal resistence when charged/discharged and that wastes power.

At what point do batteries waste so much power it is not really a beneffit to use them for grid storage?

Fortunately, most cars and battery grid storage now use assemblies of cylindrical lithium batteries (18650 or 2170) because those are Gigafactory scale ups.

If we manage to automate disassembly of a few standard cylindrical form factors (and a set of standard chemistries) and achieve 90% recycling efficiency, this could stretch the lithium lifecycle by 10x over mining.

Thanks to the big boom of cylindrical lithium batteries (over 90 percent by bulk due to large battery assemblies), that portion can be reasonably automated.

The price drops of cylindrical lithium batteries have been nothing short of astounding.

Expected to fall to about $64/kWh in 2030. A megawatt hour becomes real cheap that way.

Smartphone batteries are another thing altogether, but the bulk is actually going to be the ginormous volume of car batteries, public transit batteries (bus, trains, trams, etc), and fixed grid batteries.

They are now quickly standardizing around common cylinder shaped lithium’s assembled into massive packs. So there may be able to be some modicum of standardized automated disassembly in due time. Hopefully.

Afaik Tesla is the only automotive OEM to use cylindrical cells.

And they use them for several good reasons, production and heat being the main ones, as well as draw rate and charging speed, some of the others are looking at packet batteries because they can be more dense but they also arent looking as much at thermal management systems which are critical for a long vehicle life.

No, those are post-hoc justifications. Any student of Tesla's history can tell you that Tesla uses them because in 2009 Eberhardt and Tarpenning realized you could make a 53kWh battery pack from a bunch of laptop cells relatively cost-effectively.

That explains the 18650 cell usage, but doesn't explain why they used the same design for the 2170 cells used in the Model 3. There was obviously an efficiency to be gained from the cylindrical design and Tesla had the data to know it - whether it was design, production, functionality, or something else. Unless you're suggesting that when planning the manufacture of their first large volume vehicle they didn't bother to make the biggest single cost as efficient as they could.

Also, someone else stated the Panasonic makes the cells used in Teslas. Not really. Panasonic manufactures them, but the cells are proprietary designs from Tesla. An analogy would be to say that Foxconn manufactures iPhones, but the word "make" is probably a stretch without context.

The very old fashioned cylindrical battery shape also has some economical properties highly amenable to a cheap cradle-to-grave-to-cradle lifecycle that can be designed for both automated assembly AND automated disassembly.

Rectangular lithium batteries will still be needed for many purposes -- but the bulk (i.e. mass-manufactured electric econocars of the future) may have to follow this economically sensible long-automated old-fashioned cylinder.

Fortunately, most cars and battery grid storage now use assemblies of cylindrical lithium batteries (18650 or 2170) because those are Gigafactory scale ups.

If we manage to automate disassembly of a few standard cylindrical form factors (and a set of standard chemistries) and achieve 90% recycling efficiency, this could stretch the lithium lifecycle by 10x over mining.

Thanks to the big boom of cylindrical lithium batteries (over 90 percent by bulk due to large battery assemblies), that portion can be reasonably automated.

The price drops of cylindrical lithium batteries have been nothing short of astounding.

Expected to fall to about $64/kWh in 2030. A megawatt hour becomes real cheap that way.

Smartphone batteries are another thing altogether, but the bulk is actually going to be the ginormous volume of car batteries, public transit batteries (bus, trains, trams, etc), and fixed grid batteries.

They are now quickly standardizing around common cylinder shaped lithium’s assembled into massive packs. So there may be able to be some modicum of standardized automated disassembly in due time. Hopefully.

Afaik Tesla is the only automotive OEM to use cylindrical cells.

And they use them for several good reasons, production and heat being the main ones, as well as draw rate and charging speed, some of the others are looking at packet batteries because they can be more dense but they also arent looking as much at thermal management systems which are critical for a long vehicle life.

No, those are post-hoc justifications. Any student of Tesla's history can tell you that Tesla uses them because in 2009 Eberhardt and Tarpenning realized you could make a 53kWh battery pack from a bunch of laptop cells relatively cost-effectively.

That explains the 18650 cell usage, but doesn't explain why they used the same design for the 2170 cells used in the Model 3. There was obviously an efficiency to be gained from the cylindrical design and Tesla had the data to know it - whether it was design, production, functionality, or something else. Unless you're suggesting that when planning the manufacture of their first large volume vehicle they didn't bother to make the biggest single cost as efficient as they could.

Also, someone else stated the Panasonic makes the cells used in Teslas. Not really. Panasonic manufactures them, but the cells are proprietary designs from Tesla. An analogy would be to say that Foxconn manufactures iPhones, but the word "make" is probably a stretch without context.

There you go. The fact that the designs are proprietary to Tesla tells you why they stuck with what they knew for the Model 3 and evolved it. If your expertise is with cylindrical cells and they work for you, why change that?

But for new entrants, they aren't already invested in a particular solution. Ironically that's the argument that Teslaphiles usually make about why Tesla is superior to any other car company, because it has no legacies to worry about.

Rather than making the OEM perform the recycling themselves, I think it would be more efficient in both energy and cost for there to be larger facilities dealing with the batteries from multiple sources.

That's already what's happening for conventional lead batteries in some countries. Included in the battery price is a small tax that goes to building recycling facilities and a system to collect the old batteries. You cannot force the car manufacturer or the battery OEM to invest and spread out resources into something that is not their core business, such as recycling, and just as importantly, I wouldn't even trust them to recycle these batteries properly.

by the time they got around to building longer range BEVs the advantages of pouch or prismatic cells became clear.

Not really. You can recondition a battery pack made out of thousands of small capacity cells by replacing only the faulty ones and putting into the reconditioned packs only used cells that are calibrated to the same capacity. With pouch cells 10 times the capacity of an "old" Tesla 18650 cell, or even 40 times, since these pouch cells are usually packed into 4-cell modules, if one cell goes bad, you have to recycle the equivalent of 40 18650 cells. More modularity may be preferable in this case, so you don't have to scavenge too many used batteries in order to recondition one or to build a battery pack for grid storage.Also, weight for weight, Tesla batteries apparently have a much better capacity than soft pouch cells that need heavy metallic packaging, and don't cost much less. Regardless of form factors, chemistries or brands, we really need to standardize on the best technology and design so we can mass-produce it at the cheapest cost instead of having each car manufacturer make their consumers pay for their fancy choices and custom form factors.

I wonder how many used ICE cars would be sold if you had to replace the engine when you bought it? That's about the same as replacing a battery pack on an EV.

You don't get it, it's not equivalent to replacing the engine, but the fuel tank. A very expensive fuel tank... It is clear that most EVs are still at the "early adopter" stage, maybe except for the Model 3. There are still car manufacturers who think they can do without fast charging or temperature-controlled batteries or who rent instead of sell the batteries. Even so, most EV batteries are guaranteed for 8 years, so you can expect a 10-12 year life cycle altogether. Some businesses already sell reconditioned battery packs for Teslas and other makes, and a good BMS lowers the impact of a bad cell or even makes it easier to identify and replace only the bad ones, not the whole pack. The one-million-miles batteries we already know how to build are just too heavy for cars today, but we are getting there year after year, with batteries that are lighter or have more capacity or have a longer life or all of the above. A 300-mile range car that can only do 150 miles after maybe 10 years can still be used, with a more limited purpose.

Not really. You can recondition a battery pack made out of thousands of small capacity cells by replacing only the faulty ones and putting into the reconditioned packs only used cells that are calibrated to the same capacity. With pouch cells 10 times the capacity of an "old" Tesla 18650 cell, or even 40 times, since these pouch cells are usually packed into 4-cell modules, if one cell goes bad, you have to recycle the equivalent of 40 18650 cells. More modularity may be preferable in this case, so you don't have to scavenge too many used batteries in order to recondition one or to build a battery pack for grid storage.Also, weight for weight, Tesla batteries apparently have a much better capacity than soft pouch cells that need heavy metallic packaging, and don't cost much less. Regardless of form factors, chemistries or brands, we really need to standardize on the best technology and design so we can mass-produce it at the cheapest cost instead of having each car manufacturer make their consumers pay for their fancy choices and custom form factors.

I look forward to seeing what size of cylinder becomes the cheapest in 10 years from now -- a different manufacturer invents a different cylinder (and heck, Tesla might become a follower rather than leader).

I'm more comfortable dropping a battery pack of fourty 18650 batteries to my floor, than a single large-format pouch battery. A damaged corner wrecks the whole battery, while the majority of the 18650 harmlessly rolls all over my floor. Each individual cell can be (automatically) inspected, xrayed & electronically retested for damage/risks, and then automatically reassembled into a refurbished pack. The cylinder has some rather neat shock-absorbing properties, and sufficiently small that individual shocks aren't fatal. So less shock absorption packaging is needed for my cylinder battery packs of any kind (alkaline, NiMH, lithium, etc).

Only tiny plastic/rubbery spacers between batteries, plus some reasonable overpackaging, and then I can pretty much darn drop the whole pack to the floor from about 3 feet with a lot lower risk of writing off the battery (or at least only writing off one or two corner cells that can individually be replaced). I can't drop a lead-acid car battery 3 feet (eek).

More outer ruggedization is required for pouch batteries, which kind of affects things. The classical cylinder is quite efficient shock absorption by weight, which is important in minimizing fires during crashes.

Lead acid blocky form factor is okay because there's only one in the car, but when you've got a whole skateboard full of batteries, the natrual shock absorption properties of many small batteries may start winning a lot of favours when there's huge numbers of econocars of many brands out on the street. And if you had a choice of manufacturing tiny cubes or tiny cylinders, at these size/counts, the classic cylinder tends to be superior in most battery manufacturing for more than a century.

Heck, open up any 9V battery, they all have cylinders inside them (sometimes squat cells, sometimes lengthwise cells, but nearly always cylinders). It's well tried and proven science and economics.

The cascade of tradeoffs is quite an interesting science. Batteries are less energy-dense than gasoline by litre, but you've got other "efficiencies" like hub or axle motors that completely avoids gears and transmissions, and >90% efficient electric motors that gasoline can never remotely touch. The same concept of cascading tradeoffs have been happening to the old fashioned cylinder in many non-Tesla contexts long before Tesla existed.

I'm more comfortable dropping a battery pack of fourty 18650 batteries to my floor, than a single pouch battery [...] I can pretty much darn drop the whole thing on a concrete floor from about 3 feet without worrying about a potential fire.

Well, it's 444 battery cells in a Model S 75lb module, and there's 16 such modules in the car, so I'd be more worried about the batteries cracking the floor and splitting the house in two than starting a fire...

I can't imagine why there would exist used but functional car battery packs for usage in grid or home storage. Electric cars will be resold and utilized until their battery fail. That is what we're seeing now. Used electric cars are great value, and their low running cost is especially attractive to the people who buy used cars.

“Failed” for a car can still be useful for a grid. If your battery can no longer get you to town, or up the hill, it can still power the grid.

There’ll also be plenty of cars retired because other stuff broke. Those batteries can go to cars with failed batteries, or straight to the grid.

Failed means failed. There will be people who will buy and ride used Teslas that go 70 miles on a charge. But after a battery loses 70% of its capacity, it’s a skip and a hop until it doesn’t work at all. Also, very old batteries are dangerous.

I'm more comfortable dropping a battery pack of fourty 18650 batteries to my floor, than a single pouch battery [...] I can pretty much darn drop the whole thing on a concrete floor from about 3 feet without worrying about a potential fire.

Well, it's 444 battery cells in a Model S 75lb module, and there's 16 such modules in the car, so I'd be more worried about the batteries cracking the floor and splitting the house in two than starting a fire...

The outer frame of that 444 pack is quite rather strong for its surprisingly efficient weight. It certainly looked like I could easily drop that beast 3 feet to a concrete floor without worrying about a fire at all. Sure, a bit of damage (bent corner if it lands on corner, and a damaged corner battery if that), but the whole conflagaration? No.

The way it's done now, is that even a single cylinder(18650 / 2170 / similar) catching a fire/exploding inside a pack, now rarely cause adjacent cylinders to begin its runaway thermal effect; it takes many multiples of damaged cylinders to get things hot enough to start cascading into a chain reaction.

At the small cell sizes (single-digit to low double digit watt-hours) -- only minor tweaks like kapton-thin insulation and tiny spacers (also used for shock absorption) -- on top of existing cooling system -- is needed to prevent adjacent-battery runaway for single-cell incidents, and interferes less with cooling.

The bigger the cell, the more protection per cell needed to prevent adjacent-runaway in a way that doesn't interfere with cooling. Insulation is an annoying double edged sword -- it prevents spread of runaway -- but it bottles up heat which is bad for lithium batteries! It scales surprisingly poorly, and science kind of full circles back to using many tiny batteries (whether cylinder or prismatic), for the sweet spot of insulation:safety:cooling economics.

They've tested single-cell-failures to death. It's come to the point where it is now possible to trust a single-18650 failure to not total an electric car -- while a larger prismatic/pouch-based system requires a lot of heavier and/or space-consuming protection to trust a single-pouch failure to not write-off the whole car. The whole battery assembly needs to flex and survive. A gas tank can flex and survive, and batteries also need to, as well. This is going to be important when millions of electric econocars are on the road continually wrecking themselves (whether by pothole, curb or accident) in humankind.

Indeed, I worry about battery fires like any sensational news, but right now, "safety-weight-cost-lifecycle" mathematics still seems to be tending towards the bog-standard cylinder at the moment.

I'm no Teslaphile, though admire the innovations itself. I'm impressed how they commandeered a bog standardization into their favour, and science tends to convince me that it's one of the many strong contenders that other manufacturers will follow suit on for econocar-class pricing. (Or even vice versa -- different maker reinvents a superior cylinder shape and Tesla copies it).

I just wanted to let everyone know, as someone that works in this space, 99% of the comments gave me freaking brain cancer.

Literally the best comment is hidden because of downvoted and I only saw it because of the pile on ridicule in nested quotes.

If you RTFA, you’ll see that the authors cite the fact that most of the cost of a battery pack is indeed manufacturing (coincidentally exactly why Elon build GF) not the raw lithium or electrolyte. This forms the basic premise of the question the authors pose: is there a cost effective way to recycle these things.

The lithium isn’t as expensive as the REMs in used in emissions catalyst systems (platinum, palladium, rubidium, etc), so burning the batteries to generate a shitty lithium alloy that needs expensive purification isn’t cost effective against virgin lithium.

Selling the kWh remaining in the packs to the grid at the point of recycling sounds good until you realize how cheap grid power is, which mostly leaves grid scale storage.

The reason he's buried under negative opinion is because the issue with batteries is the waste and environmental damage that comes from lithium landfill disposal and mining.

That's a regulatory problem, not one fundamental to the production of lithium.

C'mon dude you work in natural resources. You know that mining and landfill collateral is a matter of degree not kind. The less mining and landfill we have to do the better.

We'll have to recycle the cells, as we're going to run out of lithium a lot faster than people want to admit as we transition to green energy and EVs. Even if we don't have the technology for it now, give it 10 years, we'll have good ways to pull the packs and cells apart to get the lithium out of them for making new cells.

Um, no. There is some 230 billion tonnes of lithium in seawater. Lithium will get more expensive, and recycling will be a good idea, but there is no real way that we'll "run out".

There is also a more gold in sea water than has been mined in the history of mankind. It just costs too much to get out.

What this means is that the lithium in sea water will remain inaccessible until the price of LI rises significantly higher than the price of gold.

What this means is that the lithium in sea water will remain inaccessible until the price of LI rises significantly higher than the price of gold.

However, this is not true.

Gold is 0.000008 ppm of ocean water.Lithium is 0.17 ppm of ocean water.

Expensive, but still much easier to extract lithium than gold. Even if the process was much easier per atom for gold, the many orders of margin difference and known processes pretty much mic-drops that.

Also, stronger brine contains way more PPM of lithium -- so there are some economic opportunities there during industrial-scale desalinization (drinking water from sea) and other strong brine-creating processes -- as a byproduct opportunity.

They already mine lithium from former oceans -- salt flats and regions around concentrated seas. As a former sea, Uyuni salt flats is 0.3% lithium (via brine wells), which is a whopping lot. Most current mineable sources are containing 300ppm thru 7000ppm lithium.

Seawater is just a less efficient brine. But it's only low orders of magnitude less efficient. Saltwater sufficiently evaporated, is only 1-2 orders of magnitude less lithium than current mining! Seawater artificially evaporated into stronger brine, repeated a number of cycles, can create a brine exceeding 10ppm lithium. This is only ~30x more dilute than the lower end of already-mined-lithium brine 300pm going into existing lithium batteries. That's almost only a stone throw, humankind-wise.

We'll need to recycle, but we should be focusing on the first two steps as well.

I would argue we are reducing, but it's not batteries we are reducing. But using batteries we are reducing waste and pollution elsewhere.Reuse is where we really need to get something going. Start turning all those car and power tool batteries into some grid or house storage.